TCH: People, Towns, Nations, Regions

While working on determining the number of small towns, villages and such in the area I was working on, I recalled some work I did on the very subject sometime in the last six months. I must have decided that I didn’t want to share my calculations on the blog, because I can’t find them anywhere. I found this, at least.

It didn’t actually help me find the calculations I made before, but I did finally rediscover the mental railroad I must have ridden to get there. *shakes head* Whenever I find something new and exciting, I usually give it a couple days before I blog about it, in case I come up with something better, but sometimes these things fall by the wayside.

My calculations started when I read something on Wikipedia about the Domesday book. I’m writing this in a hurry so I’m not going to link it — you can find it yourself. It got me thinking about the number of people in a town, how much land was needed in a town, and so on, up from there. Not a terribly accurate count, but useful nonetheless.

Going back to The Catan Horror, and what I was developing there, I found some modest assumptions made by some other people as to how much land is necessary to support a family via agriculture (2.5 acres), and about how many acres were in a square mile (640 acres), and this was all well and good by itself.

Then, I fiddled around with a map and determined about 2.2 square miles for a Settlers of Catan hexagon. So far, so good. That means you can assume maybe 560-odd settled families in one hexagon, or between 2,500 to 3,000 people total. (Assume roughly 30% of them are children under working age.)

edit: After coming back to this post more than once only to realize I debunked my own numbers I’m finally making a note about it.

I also redetermined the maximum number of outposts on a Catan board (26-27 outposts) and how many would fit in a compact Risk territory (13-19 per region). If we’re assuming between 39-42 territories on a Risk board, you’re talking about somewhere in the vicinity of 40 million people in the Catan-Risk world.

edit: I mixed up kilometers and miles, and subdivided territories into too many pieces for any of them to have a modicum of relevance. Nowhere else on my blog do I record numbers — not even the accurate ones I eventually determined.